Tomorrow, my family and I plan to embark on a five-day road trip out to Eastern Oregon. Unfortunately, one thing we’ll have to consider on our trip is where wildfires are burning. According to the U.S. Forest Service, “Nearly 85 percent of wildland fires in the U.S are caused by humans,” so I thought it’d be beneficial to share some of what I’ve learned in terms of best practices for outdoor fire safety.

If you were to walk into a room of 100 professionals, all with the word “content” in their title, odds are you’d hear 100 different definitions of “content strategy.” And each professional would insist that theirs is the only right answer. They’d all be wrong, and they’d all be right.

We love Clif Bar, and we think they can help their competitors clean up their act.

Clif Bar’s “Litter Leash” is a brilliant addition to their packaging; unlike Clif Bar’s competitors’ packaging, Clif Bar’s Litter Leash keeps the top of the Clif Shot packet attached and prevents trash from accumulating on the trail. Cascade Cadence thinks Clif Bar could make a huge positive environmental impact by sharing their patented Litter Leash packaging with their competitors.

We’re firm believers in outdoor experiential education and the healing power of time spent outdoors in beautiful, natural places. Combined with the work of the incredible clinical therapists at Open Sky, this is a program that is benefitting young adults and their families beyond measure. Cascade Cadence Content Marketing is proud to play a small part in telling the Open Sky story.

Cascade Cadence Content Marketing is extremely excited to be working with the great team at Solo Stove, a company that makes ingeniously designed stainless steel wood-burning stoves and fire pits with the ultimate goal of enabling their customers to reconnect in the outdoors.

At Cascade Cadence, a big part of our mission is to work with clients who share our values. One of these values is supporting a healthy planet and sustainable future. (Hence our decision to become a member of 1% for the Planet.) Considering those values and our goal of working with like-minded companies, we’re proud to be collaborating with ethical merino wool apparel manufacturer Bluey Merino. Bluey Merino is also a member of 1% for the Planet, and the company is dedicated to sourcing “certified ethical merino wool direct from Australian Merino growers and manufacturing in the country of consumption”, meaning clothing sold in Australia is made in Australia, while clothing sold in the US will be made here.

What does this mean professionally? It means the past few days have been spent entertaining my two kiddos—whose schools are closed—with adventures in snowbanks that tower over their head, shoveling feet upon feet of fresh snow, and watching and re-watching Disney’s Pocahontas and Ralph Breaks the Internet.

It also means any and all Cascade Cadence work gets done at night, long after the kids are asleep.

But it is getting done, and done well! Such is the life of an entrepreneur.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Here are a couple pictures from the neighborhood. And if I can get everything done and meet all my deadlines before the week is out, you’d better believe I’m heading up to Mount Bachelor for a “once-in-a-century” powder day!

Shoveling the walkway with Will.

Eleanor, about halfway through the storm.

The neighbor’s car, which has since vanished under significantly more snow.

Apologies if I’m slow to reply to email! If so, it’s because I’m playing with my kids or shoveling out our home!

Running my Schedule

Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I bring my running gear into the office so I can duck out at some point in the day and go for a run. I do this year-round—or try to, barring injury, workload, scheduling conflicts, etc.—donning tights, hat, gloves GORE-TEX running shoes and traction spikes in winter, and tank tops and sunglasses in summer.

Outdoor exercise is, for me, one of the most enjoyable activities I can imagine. These days, I’m lucky that my workday runs allow me to quickly immerse myself in thick woods along the banks of a beautiful river, but getting outside and active was part of my routine even when I lived in congested urban jungles. That said, I’d take a ribbon of loamy singletrack over a cracked concrete sidewalk any day of the week.

Do my runs take time out of my workday? Yes, but I’m a firm believer that breaking up blocks of time spent hunched over a desk, staring at an electronic screen or stuck in pointless meetings, with periods of activity—in nature, when possible—makes you more productive, creative and efficient, thereby negating the loss of time when you could be working through lunch and sitting sedentary under the humming fluorescent lights of your office.

Many studies have shown that an uninterrupted eight-hour workday is actually counterproductive when it comes to creativity. Instead, unless you’re “screwing in widgets on an assembly line,” shorter chunks of creative work are vastly more effective, whatever Elon Musk may think.

The Many Health Benefits of Exercise

By now, it’s scientifically accepted that regular exercise produces benefits beyond simply making sure your abs are toned for beach season. In fact, as stated by Harvard researchers, “If exercise could be packed into a pill, it would be the single most widely prescribed and beneficial medicine in the nation.”

According to Harvard Medical School, “Decades of research have determined that regular exercise is one of the most important factors in warding off cardiovascular disease, many types of cancer, diabetes, and obesity.”

This seems reason enough to lace up your running shoes a couple times a week. But regular exercise doesn’t just keep you healthy and in top shape physically; the mental benefits of regular exercise are also tremendous.

Studies indicate that our mental firepower is directly linked to our physical regimen. And nowhere are the implications more relevant than to our performance at work. Consider the following cognitive benefits, all of which you can expect as a result of incorporating regular exercise into your routine:

“Just as important: They went home feeling more satisfied at the end of the day.”

On days when employees visited the gym, their experience at work changed. They reported managing their time more effectively, being more productive, and having smoother interactions with their colleagues. Just as important: They went home feeling more satisfied at the end of the day.

Making Time for Exercise

For many of us, it’s hard to find time to exercise at all, let alone between eight and five, Monday to Friday.

But the Harvard Business Review nails why most of us don’t incorporate exercise into our workday: “…let’s be clear: What we really mean when we say we don’t have time for an activity is that we don’t consider it a priority given the time we have available.”

Instead of viewing exercise as something we do for ourselves—a personal indulgence that takes us away from our work—it’s time we started considering physical activity as part of the work itself. The alternative, which involves processing information more slowly, forgetting more often, and getting easily frustrated, makes us less effective at our jobs and harder to get along with for our colleagues.

How to Squeeze in a Work Workout

Outside Magazineshares some useful tips about how to most efficiently squeeze a workout into your workday, including making sure you’re prepared to quickly change into your workout gear when you have the time, and blocking out time on your calendar to make sure nobody books a meeting—that likely could have been an email—when you want to go for a run.

HBR, also, offers solid ideas on how to incorporate exercise into your workweek routine, including—*gasp*—choosing a physical activity you actually like! (I’m lucky that I enjoy running, but I recognize that it’s not for everyone.)

Whatever you choose to do, choose something. Science proves that breaking up your workday with an exercise routine makes you a more creative, more productive, more efficient and happier worker. And that benefits everyone.

My Winter Running Must-Haves

This time of year, when snow blankets my usual running trails, I rely on a couple pieces of crucial gear in order to make sure my runs are still safe, comfortable and fun.

When the trails are covered in snow and ice, I literally could not run safely without another gift, this one from my sister Sarah: my Kahtoola NANOspikes easily slide on over my running shoes and provide unfailing traction all winter long.

The Outdoor Research Surge Gaiters are light enough that I don’t even notice them, yet keep snow, mud and trail debris out of my shoes and off my ankles on the trail.

If you run in variable winter conditions, I heartily recommend all three products!

Trust is crucial when it comes to content marketing. For that matter, earning and maintaining your customers’ trust is crucial to the success of any organization. If your customers don’t trust you, they won’t patronize you. And the best way to gain that trust? It’s simple: Tell the truth.

A child in Rwanda enjoys a book donated through LuDela’s Better Light, Better Lives mission.

When I started Cascade Cadence Content Marketing, one of my goals was to work with people and organizations I respect, people and organizations that share my values and give back to causes in which I believe. In line with those goals, I’m very proud to be working with LuDela Candles, a B-Corp that donates a book for every product sold, helping to build libraries in underserved communities, creating the foundation for a movement of literacy around the world.

Congrats to Cascade Cadence client InkFish Inc. on launching their new website! Maggie and Travis are two successful entrepreneurs—and passionate outdoorspeople—who just launched their new joint venture. Read more about their business—and how Cascade Cadence helped them hone their story—on the Cascade Cadence blog.

I’m proud to make the support of environmental preservation via membership in 1% for the Planet a cornerstone of Cascade Cadence Content Marketing’s work right from the get-go. It’s a small commitment, but when combined with the efforts of like-minded people and businesses, I hope it will be an impactful one.

Wait a second… Didn’t we just expand our capabilities into video? Indeed, but now Cascade Cadence has also partnered with the incredibly talented Jay Turner of Jay Turner Design. That means our clients now have access to inspired art direction and graphic design for email marketing design, web ad design, infographics, packaging design, and much, much more.

Check out Jay’s work on his site. If you like what you see, feel free to reach out. We’d love to work with you.

Get the most value out of your content marketing efforts by focusing on long-tail keywords. Long-tail keyword content lets you capture prospective customers who are specifically searching for you, your product or your service. And on top of that, prospective-customers who are searching via long-tail keywords are significantly more likely to know exactly what they want, which means they’re much more likely to convert.

Marketing email subject lines aren’t randomly written off the cuff; most likely, they’re a calculated combination of numerals and words, carefully crafted to be a specific word or character count, designed based on prior test results to most effectively persuade you to click “open”.

It’s amazing how small changes in word selection, page layout, headline phrasing, button placement and other seemingly minor choices can have immediate and meaningful impact on pageviews and conversions driven by your online copy and content.